IIRC, the tendency in languages that have long diphthongs, it's the "most prominent" part of the diphthong is the one that is lengthened, e.g. [ai̯] vs. [a:i̯] (you can see this occur allophonically in Icelandic diphthongs, for example, but also in languages like Thai where the difference is phonemic). There do seem to be languages where the "less prominent" part of the diphthong is also lengthened, but this tends to occur along with lengthening of the most prominent part, e.g. [ai̯] vs. [a:i̯] vs. [a:i:] but rarely vs. [ai:] (this would tend to occur as the long counterpart to a rising diphthong [a̯i] instead, although I've only seen this on the Wikipedia article for Swabian German, so I don't know whether this is actually what this is. I've seen [ɐ̯i] and [ə̯i] reported for various Portuguese and Croatian dialects).

You can tell the same lie a thousand times,
But it never gets any more true,
So close your eyes once more and once more believe
That they all still believe in you.
Just one time.

Today, I thought about a language where for every segment there is only one syllable it can occur in, i.e. there are no two syllable that share a segment. A toy example would be a language that has /p t k/ and /a i u/: this would only allow the syllables /pa ti ku/. Of course one can use much more segments and maybe than one could say that the language does not have segments in some way?

Today, I thought about a language where for every segment there is only one syllable it can occur in, i.e. there are no two syllable that share a segment. A toy example would be a language that has /p t k/ and /a i u/: this would only allow the syllables /pa ti ku/. Of course one can use much more segments and maybe than one could say that the language does not have segments in some way?

Huh, this was much trickier than I expected, and I kind of cheated by using nasality and secondary articulations:

nɨ̃ ɲĩ ŋɯ̃ ɴã
tɨ c͜çi kɯ qa
nʷʉ̃ ɲʷỹ ŋʷũ ɴɒ̃
tʷʉ c͜çʷy kʷu ɴɒ

Not a very pretty inventory. And still too small. Not sure if anything like this could exist in a natural language - it seems that, even with languages with many phonological restrictions and patterns of harmony and whatnot, a fundamental feature of human language is multiple possibilities for combining a specific segment with other segments.

The alveolar stop and dental nasal are restricted in distribution; the dental nasal only occurs as the word-initial equivalent of the alveolar nasal while the alveolar stop only occurs intervocalically as the geminated counterpart of /r/. Additionally the apical consonants (alveolar and retroflex) are restricted to word-internal position.

That w > ŋ change reminds me of some similar changes that happened in various Italian, Romanch, and Francoprovencal varieties where it sometimes went all the way to [g] or [k]. Also coda j > k. I also read a thing by Robert Blust recently where he talked about these kinds of fortitions being especially characteristic of esoterogenous/inward-oriented languages spoken by smaller, insular communities, like groups in New Guinea or in isolated Alpine valleys.

That w > ŋ change reminds me of some similar changes that happened in various Italian, Romanch, and Francoprovencal varieties where it sometimes went all the way to [g] or [k]. Also coda j > k. I also read a thing by Robert Blust recently where he talked about these kinds of fortitions being especially characteristic of esoterogenous/inward-oriented languages spoken by smaller, insular communities, like groups in New Guinea or in isolated Alpine valleys.

That's interesting to know. I might have a use for this in a project currently.

I thought about a tone languages, wich has high, low and underspecified moras, underlyingly. Then a high tone would spread to the right, as long as the target mora is toneless. This would happen inside a word and to the first syllable of the next word. The default tone for underlyingly toneless syllables is low. Also there is downstep between underlying high tones.

That w > ŋ change reminds me of some similar changes that happened in various Italian, Romanch, and Francoprovencal varieties where it sometimes went all the way to [g] or [k]. Also coda j > k. I also read a thing by Robert Blust recently where he talked about these kinds of fortitions being especially characteristic of esoterogenous/inward-oriented languages spoken by smaller, insular communities, like groups in New Guinea or in isolated Alpine valleys.

That's quite interesting. I am thinking of applying it to my romlang as well. How exactly might the chain work tho?

I thought this allophony might maybe be explainable historically, if we assume a proto-phoneme *g. It became [ŋ] in codas (which is a very natural sound change) and [w] otherwise (also natural). I wonder what became of *b and *d.

The ejective alveolar is realised as a simple glottal stop in the onset of unstressed syllables by many speakers; in the other sounds with /~/ the sound on the right is the intervocalic realisation and the one on the left the elsewhere case. The glottal stop could be argued to be a separate phoneme in addition to this allophony, since in coda position it represents a historic neutralisation of several ejective stops.

/i i u/
/iə uə/
/ɛ ɛ̃ œ ɔ ɔ̃/
/a/

Syllable structure is CV(F), where F is restricted to one of /ʔ h ̃ ʁ/. Of these, the nasal feature only occurs with the nasal vowels (and these vowels do not occur before other coda consonants), While the voiced uvular fricative is restricted to occurring after /iə uə œ/.